The layout of the screen seems like most other web collaboration software. It has a list of participants and the icons next to each participant indicates the privileges they have eg. the ability to use audio or chat privately with a participant.

Dimdim has the ability to share a whiteboard, to share a presentation by uploading a PDF or a PowerPoint file and to share one’s Desktop. All seemed to work well in my testing.

The chat feature for back channel communications seem to be easy to use and emoticons can be incorporated. An improvement of the chat feature would be the ability for a participant to choose a font colour. Having stated that, the system assigned two different colours to the broadcaster and to the participant.

The whiteboard seems to come with the usual tools for collaborating. Some of the tools include: text entry box, a rubber stamp capable of producing many geometrical designs, a pencil for the likes of cursive writing, straight line tool, rectangle, circular and triangular frame tools that have several options. There is a clear button to erase all the objects on the whiteboard.

The whiteboard is missing a pointer tool to point out specific items when giving a presentation on the whiteboard. I really missed the pointer tool and it needs to be added in a future version in my opinion. I also like a highlighter when using a whiteboard but it does not seem to be available in dimdim.

Dimdim makes use of Adobe Flash Player 9 which uses video and audio like that found in other Adobe products. The broadcasting video is reasonably sharp but the quality is certainly lost in transmission to the participants most probably since it is enlarged a bit. I was unable to test for the use of video with other participants. It will be interesting to see what that looks like on the screen or even if it can cope.

The limit of participants seems to be twenty. More than one participant’s microphone can be allowed to operate at one time.

I was not able to test the audio / video with several participants. It will be fascinating to see how it copes with the volume.

This is a product worth considering since it makes use of a whiteboard or one can give a presentation. It is free and open source. It certainly has potential and I would think commercial web collaboration entities will be looking over their shoulders. It is a product worth observing as it matures.

The inservice will be held at Riverside Girls High School, Sydney, and it is an Education Department school. This in turn means that filtering and security is tight, often too tight for progressive teachers. Because of this security, I initiated a series of steps to test out various things to make sure we indeed can run a successful Elluminate session at Riverside Girls High School.

Courtesy of coolcatteacher, I became aware that Elluminate was offering a free 12 month subscription for their lite version. Consequently, I subscribed on behalf of my school.

I created a virtual room and asked a couple of computing teachers to attempt to login and if successful we would interact about VET IT. One of the teachers was from rural New South Wales and was not able to login from her department school. The other teacher was able to login from an internet hotspot at one of the cafes near a meeting he was attending. The unsuccessful login was a learning objective in its own right.

My next step was to create a virtual room on April 8th that was open for 24 hours, advertise it on csteachers (the csta’s electronic forum), and monitor the successful logins or lack thereof. It was very interesting. Most teachers could not log in from their schools. Messages flew back and forth on csteachers that tried to resolve the settings that were needed. A very few number of department schools succeeded. Most teachers that tried from home outside of school hours were successful. (Phew!)

Prior to the April 8th experiment, Elluminate was little known. However, after the experiment, most computing teachers at least know the title of the software.

We did discover that Riverside Girls High School can indeed access an Elluminate room through the department infrastructure. We are not sure why other department schools are unable to gain access. This in turn means that we have a high percentage chance of success to run an Elluminate session at our May 19th meeting.

Failing that, the presenter will have his own laptop with mobile broadband capability to access the Elluminate virtual room and present in a physical classroom and in a virtual room for the teachers in rural New South Wales.

Here’s to a successful Elluminate session!

The end goal is to be able to offer some CSTA workshops through web collaboration software so that teachers in rural NSW will not be so professionally isolated.

I was able to get quite a discussion going in my Year 9 Information Software and Technology class. A question came up that was something like, “Why should it be a big thing that we download music and the such for free?” The resulting discussion was very impressive and we went quite in depth. One of the better questions was, “Why is it that so many law abiding, ordinary citizens have used software to download so many television shows from Europe and North America?” I’ll let your imagination run with that one.

Those students that have been involved in the Values Exchange program were pleased that they were able to add their comments and were somewhat surprised that topics from another subject area may be relevant to other subject areas. Ah, they are beginning to see outside their eye blinkers.

I was able to contribute a wee little bit to the Horizon Project 2008. There was a request from the Horizon organisers for a teacher to facilitate a wiki page where the focus was on safe use of the nings and wikis that were being used for the project. I volunteered to carry out the request. On the wiki page I even created an animated gif which I had to learn how to do in Photoshop CS3. The teachers seemed to be impressed with the tone of the page. Strangely, no student as actually contributed to the wiki page indicating specifically what should be written or not in regards to safe use of a ning or wiki eg. user first name with surname initial only NOT first name and surname fully. Having said that, I noticed the students had amended many of their entries.

I was unable to participate in the Horizon Project 2008 weekly Elluminate meeting but I did watch the recording which was very informative. There was a request to proofread their initial 5 templates that will eventually expand to 65. I did find a couple of “typo” errors. It was easier to fix the same type three times as compared to 65 times! Again, I was able to contribute just a little bit.

I noticed that the Judges link became active and I have been the first to jump in and list my name as a Judge for the Collective Intelligence section. I chose that because it was one of the two case studies that I submitted to the Values Exchange pilot program. I next book marked a few web pages that may have a bearing on collective intelligence which in turn will be listed through a RSS feed on the Horizion Project 2008 wiki pages.

Standardised tagging strategies are being used in the Horizon Project. If one enters: http://del.icio.us/tag/hz08+collectiveintelligence, a listing of book marks world wide which have been tagged with hzo8 and collectiveintelligence are listed. This is a very powerful mechanism.

During the course of events with the Horizon Project 2008, it was announced that the keynote speaker would be Dan Tapscott, author of Wikinomics. So off to Sydney I went on Saturday to purchase the text and I also ordered via Amazon, “Look Both Ways, Help Protect Your Family on the Internet” by Linda Criddle. This was a result of the safety issues raised and the text was mentioned by Vickie Davis.

Over the weekend, I investigated Diigo. It was taking the world by storm in terms of acceptance and people joining it. Seemingly, I was one of the first to gain membership. The site seems to streamline and bring a lot of activities that are carried out by other applications to just one place. I like that! While I am a convert to it and will abandon Delicious, I would not necessarily make use of it in the classroom because Diigo is a social networking entity and that is very sensitive to many parents. Some of things it does includes:

• book marking but with annotations if one chooses, great for research on the Web
• writing an entry to your blog site
• writing a Twitter entry
• sending one’s bookmark to Delicious automatically
• sending snippets to one’s Facebook page
• sharing one’s bookmarks to one’s Friends or Groups eg. Horizon Project 2008
• installing small applications that interacts with FireFox’s tool bar
• can use one’s profile from other services such as FaceBook or Twitter
• one can standardise the Tags that are used
• dead easy to import bookmarks from Delicious

These are a few of its abilities and my sub-conscious will be processing all the experimentation that I have carried.

Phew, what a week!

There are a few schools involved in Australia and New Zealand in the pilot program. If successful and funding found, the progam can be scaled up to bigger and better things.

Teachers are required to submit a proposal that can be discussed / debated online. Students are required to research the proposal and go through a series of online screens that forces the students to articulate clearly about their stance on a proposal. The software breaks all proposals into social areas such as the Law, a group of people, human rights, dignity ect. The students rank each area by using interactive graphics. Most screens require an opinion by the student of no more than 150 words.

When the student completes the entire process, the software translates the responses into numerical data in various ways. The software also displays emperical data after a group of students have responded to the proposal.

The learning by students in this pilot program is two fold: one for experiencing the interface of the online software and two: improving their ability to persuade and / or analyse a scenario.

The teacher cannot just ‘whip’ up a proposal within 30 minutes. The teacher actually has to provide some thoughtful notes on the proposal and give details as to where further information can be found.

The author of the software, David Seedhouse, is more than willing to give assistance to teachers when polishing their proposal.

I created a proposal and with David’s assistance it evolved to:

It is proposed that social operating systems should be completely transparent and have no privacy restrictions.

The concept comes from the Horizon Report 2008. I choose one their concepts on social operating systems, identified a specific concept that may prevent social operating systems from evolving and created the proposal (again, with David’s assistance). My first proposal attempt was mediocre at best.

The language found in the Horizon Report 2008 is too complex for students in Years Eight or Nine. I did considerable re-phrasing in the hope that the students will be able to understand the concept.

To the best of my knowledge, anyone can go to the Values Exchange site and register to participate in some of the experimental proposals.

The Values Exchange Pilot Program can be found at:

http://knox.values-exchange.co.nz/

During my initial preparation and research, I discovered my textbook by David Grover was included in Course Compass and that an online presence is a definite possibility. Unfortunately, students need access codes to gain access to the course which will cost $7.60 each. I can afford that to come out of my budget.

Among several facilities, is an application entitled “TestGen” for test generator and the version is 7.4.1. The idea is to create a test on your computer and upload it to the IST course in Course Compass. I did some initial experimentation starting off with 5 multiple choice questions and uploaded them to the site. It worked quite well. I came unstuck trying to create True / False questions. I have not been able to indicate which alternative is the correct response. After several hours of trying different things and combinations, I gave up and sent a question to the Support Team. I did have to wait longer than 24 hours for a reply since it was the weekend. A correct solution was offered but it was NOT straight forward NOR were there a special set of instructions for the True / False type. It was not intuitive.

Technical glitches such as this hurts the online, elearning concept. It has to work if teachers are going to take it up across the curriculum. Course Compass is based on Blackboard but I did not find this out immediately. I assumed a commercial product should be operational and intuitive. Perhaps I will be proven incorrect and should have gone the Moodle route for a learning management system?

Conceptually, I am excited by the possibilities and can see some innovative experimentation happening. Technical glitches, please stay away! Sigh.

Postscript:

• I finally located a PDF file on TestGen where it indeed explained how to indicate which True or False option was correct. It still is not intuitive.
• I spent a long time experimenting with the Matching type question but I could not get it to operate on a web page. It did seem to work when printed out as a page, however.
  • Upon checking the Users Manual (PDF file), I found a little phrase that indicates the Matching type question CANNOT be carried out currently on a web page. Now that was a waste of time.
• I think I am safe if I just stick to multiple choice questions and True / False questions for use in a web page such as Course Compass.
• Creating a large bank of questions, that can be dragged and dropped onto a new test is worthwhile pursuing, however, I won’t see the benefits until I teach this unit twice.

My first dip of my toe into the waters of Web2.0 involved the purchase of my current RSS Reader, Feed Demon. I chose it because it was rated very well amongst reviewers. I didn’t know what a RSS feeder was at the time but I suspected I would find uses for it. (Indeed I did). Shortly after I purchased Feed Demon, it was purchased by Newsgator which allowed me to view my feeds from a web page anywhere in the world. I used this as I was in North America Christmas 2006.

The school sent me to Melbourne for a 3 day eLearning conference that was excellent. Basically, one chose a particular workshop which lasted for an hour and the presenters went to each others sessions as well. Most were very worthwhile. In addition there were physical breakout rooms where themes were discussed as well as an auditorium session every 3 or 4 hours. Again, they were excellent as well. I wrote up a lengthy summary for the school and presented it to them in January 2007. No specific concepts were taken up, but a general sense of direction seemed to be undertaken.

For the past 10 years I have been using http://groups.yahoo.com with my Year 12 students to assist them. I was also one of the founding people of csteachers which links some 400 teachers nation wide. Using electronic information systems has not been a new concept to me. I also used the same organisation for use with the Honours Program as described in a previous post.

As I was snow bound in North America during January 2006 and my daughter was in Sweden (who had setup a My Space account), I undertook creating a My Space account for myself and attempted to match my daughter’s quality. I learned a few new concepts, but since I have not kept it updated during 2007, it has not been of much use to me.

Later in 2007 I created an account with Face Book assuming some of my students made use of it. Face Book seems to have more value and I have been contacted by a couple of students from former schools as well as a teacher from Danebank. My social network could expand using this. My daughters seem to be into it ‘big time.’

Chris Betcher set up a podcasting site entitled the Virtual Staffroom which is a repository of his podcasts that have to do with education and technology. The first couple of episodes dealt with the basics of Web2.0 and a huge amount of conceptual and valuable information was crammed into the podcasts. In addition, I followed Chris’ blog site which modelled what could be done within a blog site. He seems to be at the forefront of any advance that seems to be made in the blogging world. I used Chris’ site as a jumping board to other blog sites which started my way into networking with other educationalists. I subscribed to the blog sites that were of interest to me. Hence, social networking had its hook into me.

Term 1, 2006 saw me attending a number of inservices that included the use of audacity, podcasting and blogging. I was not able to attend an inservice on Wikis due to time conflicts. I spent considerable time exploring my blogging options with students. In fact, I had set up two different sites but realised that I needed to be able to edit each student’s blog if there was a need. Our IT person, Andrew, suggested a different site but eventually I settled on Wordpress multi-user since I knew it. I was NOT willing to learn the idiosyncracies of other blogging software. Eventually, TIGS created its own Wordpress multi-user site which I used with my Year 8 Technology class and the Honours Program Participants. Surprisingly, the students didn’t jump at the chance to use a blog as a whole. I am still mulling that over. I suspect it is a time crunch thing. The use of blogs with students had mixed success.

The same can be said for podcasting. I went to an inservice on it, used an idea that Chris Betcher had used previously and implemented it in my Year 8 Technology class. We used Audacity (yes, I attended an inservice on that). The students worked in groups and were quite receptive to the concepts. The end products were of wide ranging quality. Unfortunately, we were unable to upload the end products to their blog site due to the site being down during school hours. I hope to minimise this with our own independent site.

I have not been a strong advocate of the wiki but I think that is because of my involvement with other electronic information systems over the past decade. However, I did allow a couple of my Year 11 IPT students create a wiki for one of their assessment tasks. They did quite well in terms of content and their efforts nudged open my mind a bit more. My involvement as an observer in the Flat Classroom Project Wiki as well as the TIGS wiki site has further opened my mind in the use of it. Having said that, using a Ning seems to be an alternative.

Some of the Web2.0 services tied in with the Computing Studies Teachers Association during 2007. The CSTA created and used the Delicious bookmarking site for the Simerr project as described in a previous post. I attended a National Computing Summit in Adelaide that focused on Web2.0 services. And lastly, I have made extensive use of docs.google.com to share agendas and workshop inservice assignments for each meeting. This has encouraged collaboration between the committee members.

In late 2007, I was introduced to Twitter where one sends a message in 140 characters or less. I thought it was the most inane piece of software I had ever come across. However, I have changed my mind. It is real time. It allows for social linking, not social thinking as carried out in a blog. My social network expanded by looking at the Followers list in other twitters. Because of twitter I became aware of some significant events in the cybersphere such as EdTechTalk and K12 Online.

Future:

• I would hope that in the near future I will be able to consolidate podcasting and blogging in a couple of my classes.
• I anticipate to be further trained in Elluminate (video conferencing software).
• I hope to get one of my classes involved in a collaborative project with another group of students in a different time zone.
• TIGS will be involved with the Value Added Exchange program run in conjunction with other schools. I assume I will want to monitor it because it is a new concept. It is not widely advertised since it is in its pilot phase.
• I will NOT be exploring the different aspects of Second Life due to time constraints and my fear of becoming too impressed with it.

This may be the only time that I write about a new product that is only 5 or 6 days old. I can see that the product’s use and review is zapping around the blog world at a rapid pace.

Unfortunately for me, I was NOT a user of Google titles but that could be changing. Google Reader is a nifty RSS feed reader that is free.  Too bad it didn’t exist before I purchased my first RSS feed reader, Feed Demon, which is now syncronised with Newsgator. However, it took little or no effort to export from Feed Demon my RSS feeds and import them into Google Reader.

Next I downloaded Google Talk.  Registering was a bit of a problem because I insisted on using my main email account, not Gmail and I have no intention of using it excepting in emergencies.  It took a little bit of preserverance to get Google Talk operational.

John Pederson (via Twitter) added me to his Friends List within Google Talk.  John also Shared a number of his specific blog posts through Google Reader which in turn allows any of his Friends to read the specific Blogs as well. Neat.  (Google Reader and Google Talk now interact with each other).

This seems to have a lot of potential and ties a lot of loose ends together into a possible central place.  I am confident it will be one of those concepts that will evolve as the months progress.

Certainly, as a result, my social networking contacts are expanding at a good rate globally and the contacts are high calibre.  I am learning so many new things from them!

It was very dense reading and a significant amount of material to assimulate. About the time I thought I had internalised a concept, a new event or activity took place and I was again left in the wake.  I had tentative thoughts about involving our school students but I was just a bit too far behind.  Regardless, I knew our students were very capable of producing reasonable quality videos.

While I didn’t get actively involved, I did join the Ning as an observer and watched the series of events unfold.  The task of the students were to produce a video on a given theme but they had to work with students in other timezones and the vision had to come from two or more different schools. 

The students were asked to post a ‘Reflection’ onto the Ning site. As a reflection was posted, I watched their video and left a comment which seemed to be appreciated. The students knew they had an audience.

Below are links to the winners of the Flat Classroom Project:

Winner 1.a.1 Theme: Connecting the World Online
Title: A Ring for Jimmy
Student Name: Amalia B. – LACHSA, USA

Winner 2.c.12 Theme: How the WWW has changed the World
Title: Impact on Life
Student Name: Carmyn S. – LACHSA, USA

Winner 3.b.17 Theme: How workflow software has enhanced productivity and communication
Title: Workflow Software and Students
Student Name: Fatma M. – QA, Qatar

Winner 4.a.20 Theme: The Changing Shape of Information
Title: Semantic Assistant
Student Name: Sarah H. – Westwood, USA

Winner 5.b.31 Theme: Why we should be promoting Web 2.0 tools for sharing information
Title: What is Web 2.0?
Student Name: Betsy B. – Westwood, USA

6.b.39  Theme: Globalisation and Outsourcing.
Title: Who is Affected by Outsourcing?
Student Name: Patty – SAS, China

Winner 7.c.48 Theme: Google Takes Over the World
Title: Google and the World
Student Name: Michael R – MICDS, USA

Winner 8.b.52 Theme: Personal learning environments and social networking
Title: Blog Heroes
Student Name: Zak S – LACHSA, USA

Winner 9.c.62 Theme: Mobile and Ubiquitous
Title: Fun and Convenient World
Student Name: Megan S – LACHSA, USA

Winner 10.a.64 Theme: Virtual Communication
Title: Virtual Communication: Design & Innovation
Student Name: Perola L. – QA, Qatar

Winner 11.b.77 Theme: Wireless Connectivity
Title: No Wireless=No Internet=No Life
Student Name: Amir N. – QA, Qatar

The Honours Programme is rolling along and is developing into something quite special. It would not surprise me that we are doing a “First” in NSW incorporating social networking software and student activities who signed up for the Honours Programme. (See Honours page on this site).

The Honours Programme co-ordinator was already doing a superb job with the students. My input advocating the use of groups found at yahoo and the option to create a blog has added another dimension to the programme.

Within the Honours Programme are a few genuine gifted and talented people. In the ordinary school structure, they usually are marginalised by their peers. According to studies, these type of people need some way to publicise their thoughts and ideas.

As the Honours Programme advances into the school year, the group has developed their own synergy and energetically help each other out. The genuinely gifted and talent people have created their own blogs which have been read by their peers and given positive, reinforcing feedback. These people are no longer ‘marginalised’. Wow. Great Pastoral stuff.

My Year 8 Technology group finished their animated gif tasks. The better students were able to upload their gifs to their blogs. The less able students created the animated gifs and were marked in their storage directory. I expected to see a couple of students zoom off with their blogs but it does not seem to have happened. Sigh.

It was made known to me over the week that students share the only computer at home and that they have allocated times as to when they can use it. Would you believe that is the first time I ever considered such a thing? that students have limited time on a single computer at home.

The Year 8 Technology students are onto their next task. Basically, they are to create a radio type commercial using Audacity and they are required to mix tracks. Needless to say, they are having a great time experimenting. The finished products are expected to be uploaded to their blog site as a mp3 file.

I am involved in assigning sessions at the Computing Studies Teacher Association (NSW) inservices which take place once a school term. Four workshops run at any one time and participants choose which workshop they wish to do (numbers permitting).

The committee lives all over the place. I started something new in May 2007. I uploaded the session assignment sheets and the agenda document to docs.google.com.

This way Committee members get to look at the documents as they evolve from one inservice to the next. They may make changes or comments as to how the evening should be guided. Hopefully, this will allow the Committee members be more involved in the assigning of sessions, hence, collaboration. Of course, strict deadlines over-rides everything else!

Elearning Web2.0 Technotriva

I finally finished a significant book entitled: The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman.  It appears to me to be the most significant book since Alvin Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’.

The videos that have been referred to on this site actually make use of the concepts that have been explored in the text.  Basically, the text has stated that due to recent events, technology has made the world flat and it will have impact upon our society.  Some of the main points that come to mind:

• Our education system prepares students for assembly line type work which is no longer applicable because the likes of S. Korea, Taiwan, India and China are carrying out the actual manufacturing.
• Our education system needs to SHIFT its focus.  We need to make use of technology to aid in the shift of focus.
• The ability to synthesise material from different areas and be able to explain the concepts in a simple manner is a needed skill in the future.
  • those students who take up music, drama or take up a hobby in-depth, tend to develop these type of people
  • hence, the Arts are necessary to aid in the development of the holistic student
  • in the Pacific Northwest of America, schools have shut down their arts programmes due to financial considerations.
• The ability to collaborate with others will be essential where distance is no longer a factor.
• People will need to be able to interact with the public readily.
• India has the ability to do everyone’s taxes since they are an educated population.  Australian accountants beware! the Indians can do it overnight!
• Within accounting, those people who create new concepts will be the ones that will be retained.
• The flattening of the earth will create more job opportunities but small businesses will evolve that hire 5 – 10 people as compared a company hiring 50.
• Business structures will become more horizontal as compared to vertical.
• Web 2.0 services on the web (workflow software) will allow businesses to work smarter not harder. They will be able to let the software do the administrative work on the web which in turn allows the owners to concentrate on their core business.  [Triple Convergence 1]
  • eg. the advent of e-tickets for airline reservations.  The consumer is doing the work of clerical staff.
• Different businesses will need to connect to each other and collaborate with each other rather than the old ‘command and control’.  (Supply chains for the likes of Woolworths, Aldi). Emphasises ‘just in time’ strategy.  [Triple Convergence 2]
• 3 billion more people have joined the market place with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the USSR and the entry of countries like India and China.  [Triple Convergence 3]
  • this will increase the size of the market as Indians and Chinese develop their middle class as consumers
  • communication technology allows the Indians and Chinese to carry out tasks that used to be reserved for respective countries.  eg. call centres, and production of Interactive White Boards in Canada (which most probably will move to China).
• The education system will need to shift to encourage students to be able to design, develop and create.  Technology such as video editing is a natural mechanism to encourage these skills. The likes of podcasting, blogging, NoteIT, wikis and other Web 2.0 services also are other mechanisms that can help encourage ‘the swinging voters’ (swinging students) to become engaged in their schooling.
• The development of high order thinking skills is still the top skill to develop but technology should be able to compliment those subjects that develop high order thinking skills in their own way.
• Currently there have been strong statements that ‘homework’ should be abandoned and not so much demands placed on students outside of school hours.
  • if we adopt this attitude, Australia will become less competitive with its brainpower
  • the next generation may have to work harder to maintain its quality of life

These are just a few of the points that come to mind.  It is apparent to me that the education system needs to re-think its focus.  No one will change their ways too much if the New South Wales Higher School Certificate Exams remains in its current state: that is a 3 hour written exam for each subject.

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